Google Translate allows you to explore unfamiliar lands, communicate in different languages, and make connections that would be otherwise impossible. One of my favorite features on the Google Translate mobile app is instant camera translation, which allows you to see the world in your language by just pointing your camera lens at the foreign text. Similar to the real-time translation feature we recently launched in Google Lens, this is an intuitive way to understand your surroundings, and it’s especially helpful when you’re traveling abroad as it works even when you’re not connected to Wi-Fi or using cellular data.
This is really cool. Although, Google will probably start showing you ads about whatever you translate.
Google Translate gave us options for taco meat on a somewhat recent trip. What the hell, I wondered, is “pork wire?” They also had “chicken wire.” Often entire sentences were rendered indecipherable. Probably half its translations seemed completely non-sensical.
Turns out pork wire is just shredded pork. I guess it looks a bit like a bunch of wires in that configuration. English has at least as many metaphorical conventions that would be equally non-sensical anywhere else.
Definitely a useful tool, and technically very impressive, but it also exposes the obvious problems with a literal, machine translation of pretty much anything.